Alex Carey (1922-1988) was an Australian writer and social psychologist who pioneered the study of corporate propaganda. Much of Carey's work in this area remained unpublished and was cut short by his death. In 1995, a collection of his essays (several of them previously unpublished) was published under the title Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Propaganda in the US and Australia (University of New South Wales Press; reissued in 1997 by University of Illinois Press under the title Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty). In 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published their The Political Economy of the Mass Media in dedication to the memory of Carey, claiming that Carey would have written the definitive history of propaganda in the United States had he lived to complete his work.

From 1958 until his death, Carey was a lecturer in psychology at the University of New South Wales. The main subjects of his lectures and research were industrial psychology, industrial relations, and the psychology of nationalism and propaganda. He was one of the founding members of the Australian Humanist Society in 1960.